How brands can build superior customer experiences - Part 2

?? a comprehensive look at creating a phenomenal customer experience

If you missed part one of this blog series, you can find it?here.?If you don’t have time for all that, here’s a quick summary:

• Successful brands thrive on creating lasting customer relationships grounded in empathy, trust and transparency.
• You need to understand what it’s really like to be your customer?–?step into their shoes. I mapped out the key principals to consider.
• It’s crucial that you segment customers from a behavioural, not demographic, perspective.
• Understand the emotional make up of a customer journey , how your customers think, feel and what they expect at every stage of the journey.

Clearly identify the triggers and events in a customer journey

Understanding the points of interaction that customers have with your brand and looking at the sentiment of the interactions, the intense emotions and intense moments of delight are key. Equally, identifying the triggers and events in successfully mapping the customer journey is critical.

Triggers for a B2B customer could be the product running out of stock, the freezer not working, and so on. And for a B2C consumer, they could be for a brand to acknowledge events like birthdays, marriages and graduation dates.

Understanding those triggers would in turn enable a brand to personalise communications strategies and create content that speaks to each individual customer trigger.

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We have all seen incredible examples from confectionary brands like Mars and Barilla, which allow consumers to personalise products for specific occasions, or apparel providers like Asics and Adidas that enable consumers to personalise fitness clothing at different stages of their fitness journey.

Another example of identifying the macro events in a customer journey is the recent innovation of Pepsico Sodastream Professional, where consumers can customise their water carbonation level, temperature and flavours, including their intensity. And you can add functional ingredients, such as vitamins or even caffeine. Through Gatorade GX smart patches, which are placed on the skin during a workout, the consumer can monitor how much they sweat and how much sodium they lose while sweating. This data is then communicated to an app that gives the customer the possibility to personalise their hydration strategy to match their individual needs.

This is what I describe next gen food and beverage!

Make decisions based on triggers and events

By taking the steps outlined above in the CX roadmap, your brand can decide:

• What happens when a customer gets extremely frustrated (+ why)
• What the make-or-break points are in their journey
• Quantify the cost of breakage at every point
• What improves the journey and fills in the gaps you have in terms of tech, employees and interactions

This will then enable you to find the low-hanging fruits and build a priority roadmap.

Consider the employee experience and map out the total experience

Investing in employee experience plays a critical role in your brand’s ability to win both externally and internally.

55% of executives in a Harvard Business Review survey said they believe it is impossible to provide great customer experience without providing a great employee experience. What’s interesting is that only 22% of those surveyed are making employee experience a top-five priority for investment.

Demotivated, frustrated employees that lack the right support, tools and data to serve their customers are likely to create a negative sentiment in their customer interactions. It’s crucial that brands also listen to the voice of employees, paying attention to their sentiment, the intense moments of frustrations and delight, and how their lives can be made easier.

A common example we’ve seen with quite a few consumer goods organisations is the introduction of order bots or self-service capabilities, enabling customers to place orders in a simplified way. However, in the backend, employees don’t always have the right details to fulfil orders or fulfil pre-agreed discounts and prices. Bundled information often exists in different places which actually extends the overall order fulfilment process internally, and ultimately, the customer experience too.

Given the recent great resignation phenomenon and the global talent shortage, it’s crucial that we think beyond customer experience and instead about employee and total experience.